Sometimes I must confess I don’t really know what to blog about. Today though, I feel a mite on fire. There are several things at work here.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to blog about some interesting information I picked up yesterday about swirls and eddies in flows and streams, and their place in working intentions. But last night I had an incident with something very dark, but alas all-too-common.

There are many reasons I don’t have a television. Many of them are political. I don’t remember the exact moment, but at some point in the months leading up to the 2nd presidential seletion of GWB as Faux-ty-three, I pretty much stopped watching regular teevee. I know I no longer had a t.v. by the time I met my partner. But I could feel a decided loss of interest in the tube, and it helped to wean myself from the dross of it due to working overnight. The nights I had off, I just had no interest in watching late night infomercials. I did enjoy for a time watching World News Now with Allison Stewart and Anderson Cooper–they made a fun, if a bit Disney-mouseketeer sort of madcap team. I appreciated their sense of humor, and they had a delightful chemistry. But then A.C. became white-hot and of course he would. That partnership ended, and my interest in WNN faded after that.

And unbeknownst to me, I was also getting my brains back as they say. First from my sobriety, then from my EWP abstinence. And I was discovering all sorts of delirious sensitivities in my body, some that pleased me, others not so much.

Over time, I’ve discovered I’ve become extremely sensitive to toxic stories. It’s not so easy to recognize at first. I’ve come more and more to see the toxicities well up on various fronts. I think I had an initial encounter with it with Survivor. I have to cop to an aspect of myself that appreciates a good Macchiavellian like Richard Hatch. The elegant rogue that he is/was. (The fact that he’s a gay nudist named Richard also means a bit to me. Seeing that’s also moi!) Still, I noticed around my edges that there wasn’t something right there.

Fast forward a few years, and I see that of all things Gossip Girl has some sort of malevolence in it. It was at a time when I was starting to appreciate my witchy side even more, and I tried to express this to Jody but I got perhaps a little too specific and detailed. It freaked him out to hear me say “there are entities living in between the words, even the letters on the scripts!” And I guess I can see where he would have been coming from–I started a bipolar med not soon after that.

But still, I knew of which I spoke. I know about the notion of the meme, and there are mini-memes if you will, and they live in sit-coms and infomercials and costume dramas etc.

I could see another toxic story in The Tudors as well. I did so want to like that show. But the violence and implied violence in it was just too much.

Last night, my partner’s sister had come up for a whirlwind weekend of culture and home fix-it project suggestions for us. After dinner she suggested we watch both America’s Top Model and Glee. Never again. The first was Barbie meets Survivor and it’s difficult to watch pretty people be mean to one another. Yet it was the second show that really throttled me.

There’s something particularly compelling and disturbing about the shows that are targeted to our young adults and teens. Both Gossip Girl and Glee have a similar demographic I think. But both have a decided animus in them, and it might be a generational rage. But more than that it is nonspecific. It is the type of sticky evil stupidity that adheres to all sorts of rannkled and crinkled surfaces. After the show, and after Jody dropped me off at my place (there have been a spate of robberies in the nabe, alas), I was in bed, and I found myself in a deep, dark fantasy that sucked me of life force. I started screaming the c word over and over again, with my boss’s face in my head. I got my cat Samson’s attention, and at some point, he crawled up on my chest as I lay there in this wastage of anger and agony and his calming presence seemed to suck up my rage. Suck up that which didn’t belong to me.

My kitty the feline Tonglen master!

The particularly insidious thing about shows like this, is that they put pretty people in them, and I sensed some of my high-schooler’s longings after the inaccessible linebacker for example, come forth in a torrent. It took those longings and hooked them in with the animus and the permeable hatred that is lodged in the concept of the show. Unfortunately, I would not be surprised if there was a high hate ratio in each shot. (And by “hate ratio,” I’m not exactly sure what I mean. I’m thinking of one scene in particular where a chubby, unattractive “journalist” demands that one of the other characters reveal her bra. There’s a lotta-lot o’ hate in that scene.)

Samson’s calming presence helped me to understand that I was not the author of the venom coming through me. That it became lodged in me, hooked on my own unclaimed or unfulfilled yearnings, and then before I knew it, I was fantasizing about a new way to destroy myself. And create misery for others in the process. Gee. Hooray. I can at least write a play.